The providing on the internet of rich media presentations, containing still images, animated images, video images and audio, is handicapped by the need to transmit large blocks of code and data to the client. This is a serious impediment for presenting products to electronic commerce customers who are typically connected over low-bandwidth dial-up links. They cannot be expected to pre-load code and data or wait for very long before their shopping experiences commence. A second problem concerns providing the right amount of various rich media technologies to easily and effectively address the problem of just communicating sufficient information about the merchandise. Rich media technologies either convey too little or using complicated capture/authoring processes convey far too much. A final problem concerns providing the end-user sufficient control to examine the details of a product. Examples of desirable features would be to enable a user to zoom in to examine the texture of an object such as a handbag, or turning the handbag around to see all sides, or opening its zipper to examine the inside. This translates into a need to support seamless and efficient transitions within and across multiple media type representations of the merchandise.
Therefore it is an object of the present invention to provide an improved method and apparatus for providing data for rich media experiences.
It is another object of the invention to provide a new method to arrange and transmit data and code for presenting rich data experiences.